


Still Waters

by HobbitSpaceCase



Series: HTP minifills [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alice doesn't really know what she's doing, Gen, HYDRA Trash Party, aftermath of rape, and she's trying really hard, but she kinda knows what she's doing, even though she just wanted a nice cup of tea and to sleep for a day, kindness from a stranger, starring lonely Bucky, that was the prompt, the physical aftermath of rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 22:24:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7072942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HobbitSpaceCase/pseuds/HobbitSpaceCase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alice just wanted to go home to a cup of her favorite tea and her nice warm bed after a ridiculously long nursing shift.  Instead, there's a guy in the alley near her apartment who clearly needs help, and she can't just leave him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Waters

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to keep editing this, but it's been sitting in my documents long enough and people seemed to enjoy it on the meme, so it is posted pretty much unchanged!

Alice took one look at the man hunched over in the alley by her building and was sorely tempted to turn around and leave. She had just come off a twelve-hour shift at the hospital, and she could _hear_ her bed calling to her just a few feet and one floor away. The man may have been covered in blood and bruises, but he was a pretty big, tough-looking guy. He could wait.  
  
Then she took in the tight curve of his back, the way his hair hung lank and dirty like a shield over his face, the torn clothing being twisted and further mangled by one glove-covered hand while the other cradled his stomach, and the compassion that had driven her into nursing school once upon a time kicked in. It didn’t take a genius to realize this man, for all his rough looks, needed medical attention in a bad way.  
  
This inability to leave well enough alone when something wasn’t her problem was exactly why Tom had left her, but he _had_ left and that meant he couldn’t try to talk her out of this.  
  
“Hey,” she said softly, taking a single step towards the man. “Are you-“  
  
She didn’t get to finish her question, as the man fairly bolted upright and jerked away, further down the alley. Even in the dim light filtering through grimy windows in the apartment complex, Alice could see his face go an unhealthy gray color. She could also see the dark patch on the back of his jeans that she had taken for water spread with his sudden movement, moments before his legs buckled out from beneath him.  
  
“Hey, woah!” she called, darting forwards. She stopped before touching him; he had curled in tightly upon himself, even though the position left him lying in the unidentified filth of the alley. “Please don’t be frightened,” she said, using the soft and gentle voice she reserved for a certain kind of patient. She had gone in to nursing to help people, and her years of work had taught her just how often other people in the world just wanted to hurt someone.   
  
“I’m a nurse,” she continued in the same voice. “I just got off a shift at the Brooklyn Hospital. Is it ok if I touch you? You look like you could use medical attention.” The man whimpered, high and thin and almost immediately choked off, and Alice shut up. She thought longingly of her bed, and how easy it would be to leave this stranger. Her apartment was on the other side of the building. She could go make that cup of tea she’d been craving for the past few hours (her favorite pomegranate herbal tea that she could never get from the shops by the hospital), run herself a warm bath, and go to bed. She could forget all about this complete stranger who probably didn’t want her help anyway.  
  
At least, she wished she could. In reality, she knew that if she left now, she’d just spend the whole night staring at her ceiling and wondering if he had ever gotten help.  
  
“I can take you to the hospital,” she offered. She didn’t have a car, didn’t need one smack in the middle of Brooklyn, but she could get him a cab and ride with him. It wouldn’t cost too much; she was only a few blocks away. When she moved to do just that, however, a surprisingly strong hand reached out and grabbed her ankle. She stopped immediately, and the hand retracted.  
  
“No hospitals,” the man said. His voice sounded like he’d been eating gravel. Alice tried not to think too hard about what else might have happened to damage his throat that night.  
  
“Alright,” she said instead, holding very still. “Is there at least someone I can call for you?” The man’s hand went slack around her ankle and he curled tighter into himself, but otherwise he did not respond. “If someone hurt you, I can call 911 for you,” she tried again.  
  
“No.” The man’s third word of the evening was also the most emphatic. Alice felt a brief moment of worry that the man could be dangerous. The fact remained, however, that no one with injuries like his deserved to suffer alone, especially if there was danger of his attackers returning to hurt him further.  
  
“At least come in and let me get you some bandages,” she said. “From the way you were moving, it’s likely you’ve got at least a broken leg, and from your breathing I’d add bruised or broken ribs as well.” She neglected to mention the other wounds the man certainly had. Getting women to report rape was difficult enough; she had a sneaking suspicion asking this man to acknowledge what had happened, let alone report it, would be impossible.  
  
The man remained curled in on himself, and Alice gave him time to consider her offer. She could see the glint of one eye, shining darkly against the light of a nearby streetlamp, as it assessed her sideways through a tangled knot of hair. Finally, his gaze returned to his knees, and he spoke. His words left her far more chilled than the late September breeze warranted. “Left tibia: two fractures. Right kneecap: shattered. Three bruised ribs on the left, one on the right. Minor bruising and tearing over much of the midsection and lower body. Three chipped teeth. One cracked nasal bone. No fatal damage sustained.”  
  
Alice bit back her first response. She very deliberately did not move any closer to the man in front of her, but there was no way she was letting him out of her sight without _some_ kind of medical attention. He’d rattled off a list of injuries that would leave most people incoherent with agony as though he were reading a weather report. She wasn’t even going to _touch_ the last piece of information. “No fatal damage” indeed.  
  
“Well,” she finally managed, “there’s not much I can do for the broken bones, and I still highly suggest you go to a hospital and see a real doctor.” His head turned just enough to glare at her, and she hurried on. “But, if you’re absolutely set against that, at least let me help you clean and bandage the rest of it. Any open wounds shouldn’t be left to fester, or you could get very ill.”  
  
“Can’t,” the man said, and she decided this was not the hill she wanted to die on.  
  
“All right,” she said instead of arguing. “Be that as it may, infected wounds are still very unpleasant. I promise I won’t even touch you if you don’t want, but it really would make me feel better if you’d come in and at least get clean and let me give you some bandages. I might even have some clothes you can borrow that my ex left behind.” The thought of what Tom would say if he heard her offering his over-priced Abercrombie sweat pants and hoodie to a homeless man gave her a bit of vindictive glee that was cut short by said homeless man hauling himself to his feet.  
  
He still held himself quite rigidly, and watched her with hawk-like eyes and a fiercely downturned mouth, so she held her tongue against the help she wanted to offer and turned in the direction of her apartment. “It’s just this way, and up one flight of stairs,” she said.  
  
“Thank you,” the man said, voice quiet and almost hesitant, and she smiled.  
  
“You’re welcome.”

The first hurdle came at the door into her apartment complex. Homeless Guy, as she’d taken to calling him in her head when he refused to offer a name, had done admirably well at limping to the door for a man with a fractured tibia and shattered kneecap. Once facing the open door, however, he had shrunk in on himself impressively, and it had taken some coaxing to get him over the threshold. She expected the stairs to prove another hurdle, but Homeless Guy’s reticence abated enough for him to accept her support in climbing them.  
  
Still, by the time they entered her apartment, Homeless Guy was pale and shaking. The tremors were faint enough that she might have missed them if she’d only been looking, but with him leaning increasingly more of his weight on her shoulder they were obvious. “Can you sit here for a moment?” she asked, indicating the couch with a jerk of her head. It was an old, ratty couch in a rather hideous mix of brown and green she had gotten cheap at a garage sale, so he could hardly make it more unpleasant by sitting on it before washing up.   
  
He eyed the couch for several long seconds with an unhappy frown. Finally, he nodded, slipped his arm off her shoulder, and sank down into a rigid, straight-backed position more appropriate to her grandmother’s old dining room chairs than her ugly but soft couch. “Feel free to relax,” she said rather pointedly, before turning to her kitchen a few feet away. It was separated from the living room only by a narrow counter, faced by the couch where she had deposited him.  
  
In the kitchen, the first thing she did was start some water heating in her electric kettle. She was grateful Homeless Guy had accepted her offer of assistance, even if he refused more competent and thorough medical care, but she’d be damned if he stopped her from getting her cup of tea.  
  
While the water boiled, she pulled several of her older washcloths out of the drawer by the stove and ran them under the tap to get them damp. She pulled her first aid kit out from under the sink, and grabbed the scissors just for good measure.  
  
Homeless Guy didn’t move through the whole process, not even when the kettle started hissing and she asked if he would like a cup of tea. She collected her things, balancing the mess with ease after years of practice running after doctors who were too important to carry their own medical supplies. Homeless Guy had, impressively, tensed even further while was collecting things. He stared right through her when she crouched in front of him, gently placing the scissors and first aid kit on the coffee table. Her tea cup went equally gently over the permanent ring left by months of late night tea drinking without coasters.  
  
“Hey,” she asked, keeping her voice soft, “you still with me?”  
  
His eyes flicked to hers and then back away, and then he was shrugging out of his hoodie to reveal another long-sleeved shirt underneath. She could tell there was also a t-shirt under the long-sleeved shirt, since both were torn all the way down the front. He must have been overheating like mad, but she could hardly blame him for wanting to be covered as much as possible. They gaped open over his chest and stomach, and she had to swallow back bile at the sight that met her eyes.  
  
Shallow cuts and bruises littered the space over his ribs, and his abdomen had an actual, _honest to god skull and crossbones_ carved messily into it. She bit her tongue hard enough to hurt, reminded herself she’d seen plenty worse over the years, and picked up a washcloth. “Do you mind if I clean the cuts?” she asked, holding the damp cloth up where he could see it.  
  
In response, he pulled the torn edges of his shirts open wider and looked away. “Can you take the shirts off?” she asked. She wanted to clean all of his upper body before dealing with the mess that his legs must be, if his earlier assessments were true. A part of her could admit that she lacked confidence in her ability to do anything for his legs at all, besides bandage them tightly and offer him the use of her couch to sleep on for a few days. That thought prompted her to take another drink of her tea. If only she had something stronger in the house, but she’d finished her vodka when Tom left, and hadn’t yet replaced it.  
  
And Homeless Guy was staring at her and making no move to remove any more clothing. “It really would be easier to get you clean if you could remove the shirts,” she said. “I promise I won’t touch your skin except with the washcloths, but I’m worried you might have more cuts on your arms or back.”  
  
“No,” Homeless Guy said, and well, that was that she supposed.  
  
Half of her expected Homeless Guy to grab her again, or speak, or even flinch when the cloth hit his skin. Instead he gave no sign he even felt it. She started at his collarbones, gently cleaning mud and dried blood from each scrape and cut she encountered. He did let out a hiss when she cleaned what looked suspiciously like a bite mark around his left nipple, and she purposefully avoided looking at his face.  
  
Finally, most of the dirt on his upper body had been transferred to the washcloths and she placed bandages over the worst wounds, of which there were surprisingly few for how much blood she had cleaned off of him. Briefly she considered that not the all the blood had to be his. That line of thought was promptly abandoned in the next second. If this man had fought back against his attackers, she damn well _hoped_ he’d done some serious damage to them.  
  
She cleaned his face carefully next, then ran a comb through his tangled, greasy hair, watching for even the smallest sign of discomfort. He sat still as a statue while she worked, however, not flinching even when she asked him to close his eyes so she could clean a cut along his eyebrow.  
  
Luckily, he didn’t seem to need stitches anywhere.  
  
“Stay here,” she said once she’d gotten everything she could reach. “I’m going to grab some ice packs, and then we can look at the rest of you if you’re feeling up to it.”  
  
She was immensely glad that the sink faced away from the living room. She had managed to hold on to her composure the whole ten steps to the kitchen, but she had to admit she needed a moment to herself before going back to her guest. Staring at the bloody pile of washcloths sitting where she’d dumped them in the sink seemed as good a place to zone out for a moment as any. The sound of him shuffling around on her couch was loud in the small apartment, however, making it impossible to really forget about him for even a second.  
  
She gave herself five minutes according to the microwave clock before she went to the freezer and grabbed every ice pack she owned. Then she turned around.  
  
She didn’t quite scream or drop anything, a fact which she thought quite commendable given the circumstances. Homeless Guy had stripped out of the rest of his clothing and arranged himself face down on her couch. The sweater still draped over his left arm was the only covering he had retained, and it hardly did much to cover him.  
  
Setting the ice packs down next to the first aid kit on the coffee table, she fetched a few more damp washcloths (her last clean ones, in fact), before returning to sit gingerly on the couch by his waist. A naked man was nothing she hadn’t seen before in droves, but when it came to his particular injuries right below the waist, men were less likely than women to show up to the hospital rather than letting the injuries heal at home. His back was remarkably unscathed compared to his front, so this time she started the cleaning with his thighs.  
  
Once again, he remained eerily silent while she cleaned and bandaged the cuts. Even when she wrapped ace bandages around the places with broken bones in lieu of any better options, his breathing barely changed. Only once, when she ran a fresh washcloth across his perineum and down towards his scrotum, both to clean off the blood and to assess if there were any wounds there or if all the blood came from his anus, did he make a noise. It was a soft, wet sob choked back almost as soon as she heard it, but she immediately jerked her hand away and apologized. He said nothing further, but she could see the lines of tension in his shoulders, and the slight trembling in his thighs that said he desperately wanted to close them against her ministrations.  
  
A sudden rush of admiration for this lonely, hurting stranger washed through Alice. As big and tough looking as he was, she could hardly imagine how intensely humiliating it must be for him to bare himself so to a stranger, after being violated so thoroughly by whoever had attacked him. She resolved to suggest a hospital again tomorrow, after he’d had a chance to rest and hopefully felt a bit more comfortable with her.  
  
For now, however, she simply packed some ice around the shattered kneecap and broken tibia. Then she slipped the old blue afghan her mother had knitted for her as a child off the chair by the couch and gently laid it over her guest. He made a questioning noise as the fabric touched his skin, and she smiled down at him sadly.  
  
“You’re welcome to stay here for the night,” she said, crouching by his face so he could see her without twisting his head too far. “I’ll be just down the hall, and if you need anything you can yell.” She pointed down the hallway opposite the door where they’d come in, only a few steps from the arm of the couch where his head rested. “I’ll bring you out some of Tom’s old clothes,” she added, “and you can change into them now if you want or wait till later. I’d advise waiting so you don’t jostle your legs too much just yet, but I understand if you don’t want to.”  
  
\--------------  
  
The next day, the homeless man was gone. Alice had not heard a single movement through the night, and she was a light sleeper. Yet, when she crept out into the living room to check on her guest, the only traces of his presence the night before were the bloody cloths in the sink and Tom’s missing clothes. He hadn't even left his own ruined clothing behind.   
  
She sank down onto the couch where he had sat the night before. She should report the encounter to someone. Reporting the obvious crime to someone was the clear thing to do, now that the man was no longer in her home and saying no. She knew that. She didn't move. Her phone was still on her nightstand next to her bed, much to far away to reach. Besides, she knew what happened when the cops investigated sexual violence against homeless people.  
  
Nothing.  
  
It'd hardly make any kind of difference if she just skipped the middle step and went straight to the end result. It was her day off, anyway. Nothing was exactly consistent with her plans for the day.


End file.
